Rep. Dennis Kucinich Thows His Support Behind Sen. John Edwards for Iowa Caucus

MSNBC Live ^ | January 19, 2004 | Lester Holt

[smoke filled room]

Rep. Kucinich of Ohio just said on MSNBC that if he hears from the early estimates this afternoon that he is not getting 15% that he will throw his Iowa support to US Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

He did not comment about if he was dropping out of the race or not.

[sweetliberty]

Judging by your posts, Cheri, I take it that you prefer not to model after the new "femininity." I thought that grungy French look was supposed to drive men wild...or was that away?

[sweetliberty]

Hmmmm...how brave are you? If you trust her inner sense of integrity, perhaps sending her to the DU would be a real eyeopener as to the kind of freaks she is aligning herself with. On the other hand, you would certainly not want to encourage her to become one of them.

[sweetliberty]

"I have never wanted so desperately to get my hands on a '57 Chevy, pack the fenders with cement and replace the bumpers with solid oak 4x4s and just have an "accident" all over her vehicle"

ROTFL! Spoken like a true southern redneck.

[sweetliberty]

"But for my money Dean is no part of anybody's plan, but his own"

Dean is the fly in the ointment of the Clinton strategy. Nothing more.

[sweetliberty]

"These guys change their mind like they change their underwear."

That statement is based on the fundamentally flawed assumption that they are like regular people.. .

[Quix]

He evidently cornered the official Navajo endorsement this past Saturday. His people and some Navajo leaders/officials were meeting in the Civic Center here where our weaving guild was meeting in a different room. Then, later I heard that the Navajos gave their support to K.

Many seem to have swallowed a lot of commie PC filth.

Sigh.

[sweetliberty]

Sounds like a pretty clever move on Neil's part having on 2 of the most pathetic poster boys for democRAT failure in modern history.

[weegee]

Dean thinks he the candidate but the party minds don't want him to front the ticket. Dean DOES attract Green Party support.

Dean could always throw his endorsement to a third party but I don't see that happening.

[pointsal]

What did Denny do....offer a free date?

[sweetliberty]

Hehehe....that one must have taken some time. Nice job meekie.

[MeekOneGOP]

Hey, thanks. Yes it did. Lots of head shots to trim, captions to make, etc. ...

Well worth it, though (imho) ...

[sweetliberty]

I'm impressed.

[MeekOneGOP]

Oh ... thank you. What a sweetie you are ...

[kcvl]

In March 1996, he (Edwards) got an invitation to the White House, his first -- thanks to Wade. The Edwardses came to Washington to meet first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as part of a ceremony honoring Wade for his writing. He made the finals in a contest whose theme was "What It Means to Be an American."

[Mo1]

http://www.geocities.com/nctechwriter/WEF/edit.html

The kicker: Some 30 years earlier almost to the day, Wade’s mother had also been a finalist in a similar contest, writing under the topic, "Democracy: What It Means to Me."

[kcvl]

Edwards began his career in 1978 defending big businesses in Nashville.

His team's first major win came in the case of a 58-year-old alcoholic whose doctor prescribed three times the recommended amount of the drug Antabuse. The patient overdosed, suffering permanent brain damage.> The judge seemed skeptical from the outset. When Edwards and a co-counsel refused a $350,000 settlement. They wound up getting a $3.7 million settlement. Soon, seven-figure awards became common: A Greenville, N.C., girl born with brain damage got $6.5 million. The widow of a Guilford County man whose X-rays showing fatal lung cancer were misplaced, and ignored, received $3.25 million. Like many personal-injury lawyers, Edwards typically took a third or more of the winnings.

client Billy Joe Johnson. His family received $2.9 million in settlements after an ambulance driver ran a stoplight, killing his wife.

The biggest complaint critics make about Edwards' legal career is that he made his millions in a profession many Americans find distasteful and even damaging to the nation's health-care system.

David Bruton, a member of former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt's cabinet and a Moore County pediatrician. Edwards sued Bruton's partner and his practice on behalf a baby born with brain damage. "He's a skilled user of a very flawed system."

"I think of a lawyer as being like a doctor," John Edwards wrote. "They both give advice and save lives."

Some of the doctors he sued complain that Edwards' approach ignored fundamental facts about their work. He often depicted cases as battles between right and wrong. But medical decisions, doctors say, are complicated and drenched in subtlety. "Every parent expects an IQ of 140 and a Harvard Law graduate," said Dr. Lorne Hall. "When something less than that happens, they feel they have a legitimate case." Edwards sued Hall, a Raleigh obstetrician, on behalf of a baby girl who developed cerebral palsy due to a lack of oxygen in the womb.

Asheville's Dr. Peter Gentling opted for early retirement soon after facing Edwards in court.

In 1992, Gentling treated a woman with a family history of breast cancer. Years earlier, he had removed a cancerous lump from the woman's left breast. A new needle aspiration showed the possibility of a malignancy in her right breast.> Gentling, in practice since 1969, removed both breasts without waiting for a biopsy. He found no cancer. An arbitrator ordered him to pay Edwards' client $850,000. "The lawyers and the insurance companies have taken over," Gentling said of his decision to retire early. "John Edwards was part of that."

Edwards joined the Inner Circle of Advocates, open to personal-injury lawyers who have completed at least 50 trials and won at least one $1 million verdict, at 37.

Edwards sometimes got so involved in his work that he seemed to neglect a few of life's basic responsibilities: He voted half the time and on many occasions failed to pay his property taxes on time. He's lost his wedding ring several times, to the point that his wife finally visited a jewelry store and bought every size nine men's band in stock.

In 1992, Edward left Tharrington Smith to start a firm specializing in personal-injury work with friend David Kirby. "John wanted to be lean and profitable," said former boss J. Harold Tharrington. The new law firm reflected that attitude: Edwards and Kirby would spend $250,000 preparing a case, hiring experts and staging mock trials. Yet they rented space on the outskirts of Raleigh rather than a skyscraper suite downtown and kept just two other lawyers and three nurses on staff. Kirby says Edwards owned two courtroom suits -- one blue, one brown -- and got antsy splurging on $150 sneakers.

By his early 40s, Edwards had built a small fortune.

"Everything he touched turned to gold."

---

Edwards friend oversaw estate case
Bankruptcy judge awarded fee of $1.06 million to firm in case on which Elizabeth Edwards worked

By MATTHEW EISLEY, Staff Writer


A federal bankruptcy judge in 1999 approved a million-dollar fee for the law firm where Elizabeth Anania Edwards once worked -- one month after Sen. John Edwards got President Clinton to nominate the jurist as a lifetime federal trial court judge. There's no evidence that the senator knew about the case, or that Elizabeth Edwards, who had left the firm three years earlier, was involved in it at the time.

Bankruptcy Judge Rich Leonard approved the $1.06 million fee in a case called Conner Home Sales, a liquidation bankruptcy of a mobile-home company in which Mrs. Edwards had done most of her firm's work from 1989 to 1995 as trustee of the Conner estate.

Leonard, a close personal friend of the Edwardses, says he saw no reason to recuse himself from a case that he had been handling for years without any complaint from the parties. They were Nicholls & Crampton; First Union National Bank, Conner's main creditor; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had an interest in the assets of a Conner subsidiary that financed the sales.

Leonard, who didn't get the District Court judgeship and remains a bankruptcy judge, said the suggestion that his nomination by Clinton or his friendship with the Edwardses might have influenced his fee decision was baseless.

The circumstances are unusual in part because Mrs. Edwards hadn't kept records of how she spent the time she worked on the case, later estimated at 2,850 hours over six years. That was more time than the firm's four other lawyers and a paralegal recorded spending on it.

Bankruptcy Administrator Marjorie Lynch noted that when she recommended a smaller fee of about $952,000 . The firm had requested about $1.3 million .

Mrs. Edwards said she didn't keep track of the time she worked as a part-time associate.

Leonard had been among John Edwards' best friends for more than two decades, since they worked as law clerks together for a federal judge in Raleigh. They and their teenage sons climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 1995. And Leonard had known Elizabeth Anania since they were undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Code of Conduct for federal judges says they should uphold the integrity of the judiciary, remain impartial, and avoid impropriety and the appearance of it.

The code does not explicitly mention handling the cases of friends. But the guide "Checklists for financial and other conflicts of interest" on the federal courts Web site says judges may be disqualified if, among other reasons, "your impartiality might reasonably be questioned on any other basis (for example, presiding over cases handled by close friends) ."

[kcvl]

Elizabeth Anania Edwards

Birthdate: July 3, 1949

Birthplace: Jacksonville, FL

Religion: Methodist

Met John Edwards: At University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Law School

Occupations: Clerk, U.S. District Court Judge Calvitt Clarke, Jr., 1977-1978; attorney, North Carolina Attorney General's office, 1981-1984; Attorney, Merriman, Nicholls and Crampton, 1984-1986; Adjunct Instructor of legal writing, University of North Carolina Law School, early 1990s; Member, Public Fellows at the College of Arts and Sciences at University of North Carolina, 1996-1997.

Education: JD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1977 and BA, English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971.

[Mo1]

Check this out


http://indyweek.com/durham/2003-11-19/first.html

Both semesters sophomore year I also was in political science classes with Charlie, including an intro to foreign government. Another political friend of ours in Hinton James that sophomore year was Elizabeth Anania, now married to U.S. Sen. John Edwards. Charlie, Elizabeth and I were all active in a number of anti-Nixon activities. I was interviewed by the Boston Globe earlier this fall about Charlie after Elizabeth told a Globe reporter she had known Charlie and gave the reporter my name and phone number

[kcvl]

In 1977, Edwards passed the North Carolina bar exam and on the same weekend married his fellow law student, Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of a Navy pilot, who had lived in Japan, Washington and Florida. He gave her an $11 ring and borrowed $2 for the $22 motel room where they had their one-night honeymoon. She had a one-year clerkship in Virginia Beach while he clerked in Raleigh. His first job as a full-fledged lawyer was in private practice in Nashville, Tenn., where their first child, Wade, was born. But Edwards says Nashville never felt like home and in May, 1981, the family moved to Raleigh.

Edwards got rich trying several hundred personal injury cases over 20 years. He has just finished renovating a multimillion-dollar, 1820s-era mansion in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood, He also owns a beach house in North Carolina and a home in Raleigh.

In his new book, "Four Trials," Edwards spells out why he thinks his pursuit of justice for the innocent in going after negligent corporations led him to think he'd be a good president fighting for the downtrodden and, incidentally, explaining why he thinks some of the massive judgments for victims against companies are justified.

Edwards writes, for example, of his first medical malpractice case -- a once cheerful salesman prescribed hefty doses of Antabuse to combat alcoholism. Instead, the man went into a coma with brain damage and when he woke up, he was a shell. Edwards helped win him $3.7 million.

Another case he cites involved a five-year-old child who was partially eviscerated, losing 50 percent of her large intestine and 80 percent of her small intestine, when she got stuck in the drain of a wading pool, her family desperately trying to break the suction.

Representing that girl, Edwards says, he learned there were other cases of children getting stuck and badly injured or killed because the manufacturer simply didn't use screws where it should have. He won a $25 million judgment against the company which he says in outrage "denied and avoided and obfuscated and covered up" in not doing the right thing.

[kcvl]

Edwards is a strange political animal: a multimillionaire who harbors a laborer's anger; a man with an expensive haircut who wears a cheap watch and worn-down shoes; the owner of four houses who employs a live-in nanny and a housekeeper but still celebrates his wedding anniversaries at Wendy's because that was what he and his wife did when they first married.

He has even written a book, "Four Trials," about his life as a lawyer, in which he casts himself as a champion of average people against powerful businesses and tries to dispel any notion that he is an ambulance chaser. His speeches often sound as though they could come from a union leader. He derides Bush as an elitist and a "phony" who cares about nothing but protecting the wealthy.

At the very least Edwards could be described as driven by a belief system learned from his father, who retired as a midlevel manager in the Milliken Co. textile mill in the tiny town of Robbins, North Carolina. It is a strict egalitarian code, founded on a distrust of big business and a simmering indignation at perceived injustices faced by working people in America.

"His overriding theory is to have a country where you put the starting point closer to the same place."

Edwards, who is 50 but looks much younger, was considered a hot prospect in Washington two years ago - a kind of Bill Clinton in the making.

Because of his trial skills, Senate leaders chose him in early 1999 to depose key witnesses and deliver the closing arguments for the defense in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

So impressive were his first two years in office that Al Gore was said to have considered him for vice president.People magazine named him the sexiest politician in America.

Edwards is itching to engage Bush in a one-on-one debate, and when he talks about the possibility, his public mask slips a bit. A schoolyard machismo flashes.

"If I can be on a stage with George Bush in a debate in 2004, with my background, what I've spent my life doing, wouldn't you love to see it?" he told some voters in Merrimack, New Hampshire, in September, laughing hard. "I can beat this guy. I can beat this guy." The New York Times